You just had one of the worst meetings of your career. You thought it was going well but when you started to feel the pressure you managed to lose your composure. You felt like everybody was watching you and waiting to see what you would do next. When you’re under that kind of pressure your brain can go into overdrive and you start thinking the worst. Calm leadership means staying present and clear-headed while still feeling the pressure. You’re not suppressing or disengaging from what is going on. It’s a skill you can learn and nothing to do with personality traits.
In this article, I’ll explain how you can lead calmly under pressure without getting stressed.
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What Calm Leadership Actually Looks Like
Do you really know what to do when you are feeling tense and under extreme amounts of pressure? Is it even something that you are taught to handle as a leader?
It can be challenging when you have a team to look after and people to answer to on the board. If you’ve not had any training in this area it can feel quite daunting and you might have been trying to figure it out yourself.
Knowing how you can lead calmly under pressure can change everything in how you lead. The pressure will always be real, but how you deal with it can define your leadership.
Calm Doesn’t Mean You Have To Be Passive
I’ve encountered leaders who have a really strange take on being calm.
Some believe it is all about suppressing your feelings and bottling everything up inside of you so nobody knows what is going on. Others think it is best to disengage from the situation completely and not react to what is going on.
This isn’t being calm.
Calm leadership is when you can stay present and clear-headed while actually feeling the pressure, but you consciously choose not to be taken over by the feeling.
What Stress Actually Does To Your Leadership Brain
When you are feeling under acute stress, your brain starts to prioritise your threat response over any type of considered thinking. This quick illogical response is responsible for bad decisions made in the heat of the moment.
When stress hijacks your clear thinking your head can feel foggy and you might even get decision paralysis. Instead of reacting fast to the situation at hand, you can end up spiralling down in the moment and completely freeze.
You can find out more about this in this article about overthinking at work.
Why Your Brain Stops Thinking Clearly Under Pressure
The amygdala is an area of your brain that processes emotions. When this area perceives a threat to you, it automatically puts your body into a fight-or-flight mode. Learning how to respond to these moments in a calmer way can help you to stop reacting in the wrong way.
That is why being calm as a leader is not a personality trait that you might have or might not have, it is a skill that you can learn.
If you’re in the thick of this right now, this is exactly the kind of moment a Check In With Sally session can help you work through.
Four Tools To Lead Calmly When It’s Hard
When you are in a stressful moment, it is easy to get caught up in the raw emotion and react in a bad way. However, you can use some easy tools to help you handle these moments in a calmer and more effective way. Here are four things you can do to help you stay calm when you feel under pressure.
What To Actually Do In The Moment
1) Breathe and drop your shoulders
Make a physical reset before you respond to the situation. You can start by breathing in slowly and then exhaling more slowly than you inhaled. When you exhale, make a point of relaxing your shoulders and letting them drop down in a relaxed position. It will immediately relax you.
2) Use a pause practice
You only need to buy five or ten seconds before you respond and you can do this by saying out loud something like, “Let me think about that for a moment”. It will give your brain time to catch up with your emotions. You can use it the next time somebody challenges you in a meeting.
3) Name what is going on internally
Give a label to what you are feeling. For example, you might say to yourself (inside your head) “This is frustration” or “I have a fear of looking incompetent”. By doing this you create a little gap from between the initial emotion and the decision. This simple act of “affect labelling” helps to reduce the intensity of the feeling.
4) Use a recovery habit
If you don’t use a reset after something has happened, you can take that negative feeling and stress into your next meeting or conversation, etc. You can stop it in its tracks by taking a short 2 minute walk, writing down and acknowledging what happened, or even saying something out loud like, “That was hard.” You have to do it straight after the stressful moment so it closes the loop for you.
What Your Team Feels When You Model Calm
When you lead calmly under pressure it can also make a huge, positive impact on your team. For example, when you experience a high-pressured moment but you hand it in a calm way and show yourself to be a steady leader, your team soaks up this steadiness. You’ll find that decisions in your team will get made faster and people will also speak up instead of freezing on the spot.
Calm Is Contagious, But So Is Panic
This is why self-management is so important. If you handle a stressful situation in a negative way, it can also affect your team. Just as calmness can spread to your team, so can chaos and negativity. Thinking about how you conduct yourself under pressure, can have more of an impact than you may have realised on your colleagues.
If you would like to talk something through, I offer Check in With Sally for £85. It’s an hour session that can help you address these high-pressure moments.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you lead calmly under pressure?
Calm leadership isn’t a personality trait. It’s a skill you build by managing your response in the moment rather than suppressing or disengaging from it. Start with a physical reset like a slow exhale. It helps to buy yourself a few seconds with a pause practice. You can then name what you’re feeling internally and use a recovery habit afterwards so the stress doesn’t carry into your next meeting.
How do you stay calm in a high-pressure meeting?
Start with a physical reset like a slow exhale, then drop your shoulders. Buy yourself a few seconds with a pause practice before you respond to the situation. Naming what you’re feeling internally can also help create distance between the emotion and your next decision.
Sally Leslie is the founder of The Leslie Link. She speaks, runs workshops, and coaches leaders and senior professionals, helping them build the emotional intelligence, meditation practice, and resilience. She’s the author of Think Clearly. Lead Calmly. A Guide for Leaders Under Pressure. Based between Newcastle, UK and Mallorca, Spain. Sign up to her Calm Leadership newsletter.
